Reader Question: How is the spec market for Christmas stories?
Over on The Black Board, Ian asked this question:
How is the spec market for Christmas stories? For some reason I keep coming up with Christmas story-concepts, and I’ll write them one day regardless, but it made me wonder if there’s an annual hunt for new holiday stories or if those come predominantly from established sources.
Hollywood is always looking for movies they can release in the Holiday season [first Friday in November through New Years week or weekend]. Why? Check this out: BoxOfficeMojo divides up the year into 5 seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Holiday.
Let’s track the domestic B.O. by those 5 seasons in 2012:
Winter: $1,243.9M
Spring: $1,646.5M
Summer: $4,303.7M
Fall: $1,136.4M
Holiday: $2,114.9M
As you can see, Summer is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla weighing in at 2–3 times total B.O. compared to the other seasons. What’s #2? Holiday. So the first thing to note: The Holiday season is the 2nd biggest opportunity for Hollywood to rake in your box office dollars.
While most of the movies released during the Holiday season are not directly tied to Christmas [for example, Skyfall was the #1 B.O. movie in the Nov-Dec time frame], it’s common to see at least one or two holiday theme movies released in the last quarter of the year.
Why? To draft off consumers who become increasingly focused on the holiday season.
Moreover there is the evergreen component. That is if a Christmas-themed movie succeeds, the studios are likely to see future revenue from it as it plays on TV, NetFlix, and so on.
Just think of movies like A Christmas Story, The Santa Clause or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. They seem to play on TV year after year after year.
Speaking of TV, there are a host of American cable TV networks that produce Christmas movies for broadcast annually including Lifetime, ABC Family, Disney and the like. Obviously budgetary considerations are an issue, but they do represent another set of potential buyers.
If you do choose to write a Christmas theme movie, the big challenge is to come up with a fresh take and unique spin on familiar material. But that’s the case with all spec scripts.
One caveat: While buyers will always be open to a great spec script with a Christmas theme, it’s a pretty narrow market. You write a great generic action or thriller movie, you can sell that year-round to buyers. You write a Christmas movie, the realm of possible buyers shrinks considerably because the window of opportunity [3 months] is less than a movie that could be released at any point in a 12 month period.
So as always, a Christmas theme project, like all spec scripts, boils down to great concept and great execution.
What do you think? Is it worth your time and effort to write a Christmas theme spec script? If so, why? If not, why not?
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